Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Legislating Compassion

I just finished reading Donald Miller's Searching for God Knows What. Quite a thought provoking book. And quite a perspective changer/confirmer for me. He paints a picture of Jesus and the Christian as truly in a relationship and love-based deal. He also writes of our Life Boat mentality and how, here on earth, we live our lives posturing for position aboard this Life Boat, searching for status, acceptance and redemption. Whereas Jesus and the Godhead live outside the boat, and in their omnipresent glory have quite a different perspective that us on the Boat. So it's a good book.

Where Miller really drove some thought provoking stuff home to me specifically is towards the end in his chapter entitled Morality. Here he steps pretty hard against the right wing conservatives (RWC), and broadly, the traditional church (TC). It really got me thinking of a few things. How the RWC and TC can appear so loud and unloving as they speak to things like morality. How skewed I am in my own perspective of the not moral. What is my delivery like when speaking about things. Is it an "I am right, they are wrong" perspective, or is it an "I love you".

Ideologically speaking, I don't believe you can legislate compassion—that is for the true church. Relationally and personally speaking, I wonder. Do I deliver a message of love and redemption? And do I do battle with the prisoners and not the enemy? I don't want to be a clanging cymbal.

By the way. His chapter entitled Jesus is freakin' great...

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